The Jack Kerouac Massacre: Here's The Most Efficient European Road-Trip Ever

45 cities, 29 countries, two city-states and 16,287 miles (26,211 km). According to Computer Science graduate research assistant at Michigan State University and blogger Randal Olson, this would be the optimal road trip across Europe.

Armed with this interactive map, it would take you fourteen days to complete the distance. As long as you don't need to sleep, have loads of cocaine or if you're just a robot. If you're not, Randal Olson would advise you to take at least three months and to "to add some stops between Poland and Estonia".

If you don't, the perfect European roadmap would look spectacular anyway. You're supposed to start in Paris, go West; take a quick tour in the UK then rush to the North until you reach Marknadsvägen, Sweden. There you can take a well deserved two minute break. Go across Finland to the South, then dash to the Baltic countries before refuelling in Krakow.

At that point, take a nice tour in Eastern Europe then go down to Istanbul then Athens before riding up via the Balkan side of the Adriatic. You've done the hardest part. Now if your car is still running, it will be Italy, Austria, Switzerland, the French Rivieira and then the Iberian Peninsula to Lagos, Portugal.

Now that you're at the edge of the Old Continent, just take a plane - or let's go crazy, a boat - to the US and take an optimal road trip across the US. Or more realistically, just go see your mom.

A data analysis of Europe

Of course, the choice of these steps is subjective and was not even picked by Randal himself. The data which was published in July 2014 by Business Insiderin an article titled "50 Places in Europe You Need To Visit In Your Lifetime".

What Randal did was take the data and put them in an algorithm he created. The point is to minimise the travel time between every point, eliminating the ones not accessible by the road. The formula has already been used to calculate travels in the US, South America or even just across Michigan.

You can even use Randal's Python code, licensed via Creative Commons to plan your own summer trip across Wales.